Black Hole Son Cornell Makes Virgin Passengers Scream

Ex-Soundgarden banshee Chris Cornell’s horrific dance album Scream recently inspired Underwire to draft up a popular list of audio atrocities to throw down a sonic black hole. Now Cornell has partnered with Virgin America airlines to inject Scream into the ears of its boarding passengers. Strap on your oxygen masks!

Starting in October and extending through the winter holidays, Virgin and Cornell pair up to cross-pollinate influence. The America-based airline, a stateside spawn of superstar billionaire Richard Branson‘s British fleet Virgin Atlantic Airways, gets a revered pop headbanger to add to its marketing resume. For his part, Cornell lands loud love from the airline’s in-flight programming, radio contests, sponsored performances and more.

The fine print? Select tunes from Scream will play while passengers are loading onto the plane.

The good news is that Virgin is killer when it comes to in-flight entertainment. Its planes house entertainment systems stocked with thousands of MP3s, as well as scores of music videos and movies. The bad news is that subjecting paying passengers to Scream while they’re boarding might be stretching Virgin’s air cred.

After all, our black hole wish-list, thanks to Cornell’s heinous headliner, birthed a popular feature called Black Hole Fun that went viral across all of Wired’s blogs. This is a musical effort that was not meant to be played in a vehicle with limited escape options.

Perhaps Scream might be a better fit for Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which is looking to launch space flights sometime in the next couple of years. Who knows? If all goes weird, in the future Virgin and Cornell might actually help you deliver Scream into a black hole. Jesus Christ pose, optional.